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'If the dongas get much deeper, the World Heritage Site might fade from the map'

The Baviaanskloof is being hammered by drought but it was a leopard that did the damage to a thorn bush on Pieter Kruger's farm, Zandvlakte

He pointed out the murder scene - a bathtub-shaped hollow in the brittle canopy where a large male choked a young kudu bull a few weeks before. The kill was watched by some American visitors braaing outside a cottage at the mouth of a stark ravine, one of many which cleave the mountain ranges as if struck by the axe of a crazy god.

What the Americans thought of the twilight show Kruger didn't say, but Richard Wagner would have loved the operatic setting of red cliffs splashed bright yellow. Time as vandal, using a Dulux palette.

Three generations of a family are buried near the back door, their simple graves warmed by blankets of spiny succulents which keep baboons at bay. There's a recent touch to the melancholy, a small monument to two microlight pilots, one from the Baviaanskloof. Alan Honeyborne drowned in China in 2004 while attempting to fly around the world. The river into which he crashed was 300m broad. The stony floodplain overlooked by his memorial is wider, but bone dry.

The leopard episode thrills Kruger. Obviously it adds froth to tourism, once small beer but now a growing enterprise. It also confirms for him that the kloof's top predators only kill livestock when this is the easiest option. His drought-reduced Angora herd browsing a plateau high above the floodplain is guarded by a fiercely protective Anatolian sheep dog. It's not their common Turkish ancestry that inspires it, rather it sees itself as a goat, as one of the flock.

Could I meet this confused paragon, pat its head maybe? Kruger was hesitant. "It doesn't like predators," he said. It can spot a journo at 50 paces.

Anatolians are weaning farmers off gin traps, hitherto a weapon of choice. Fashionable now are radio-collar tracking devices and camera traps. The hope is that next time you see a kloof leopard on TV it will be to the twitter of David Attenborough and birds, and not because it died trying to chew off a paw to be free of a trap's steel teeth.

The Zandvlakte homestead, a green oasis up the valley, was filling as entrants in the next day's inaugural 35km trail run drove up in clouds of dust from afar. The oldest farm cottage, dating to 1811, and other outbuildings, have been, or are being, transformed to meet the demands of city slickers. One unfinished wing had a row of unconnected toilet pipes poking through ports in a long wall, like a broadside of cannon on a naval frigate in the age of sail. Kruger clearly understands a fundamental of good marketing, getting bums on seats.

The kloof has been farmed for generations to the east and west of its 270000ha wilderness core, now a World Heritage Site. The hope is to double its size by buying up farms - but the reality is that it is the farmers, not the Eastern Cape authorities, who make the kloof work.

On Route 332, from Willowmore in the arid west to Zandvlakte on the wilderness border, farmers have enthusiastically embraced the opportunities tourism brings. They know there's gold in them thar wheels rolling past their cattle grids, be it in a flashy 4x4 or a Chico rental from Aunty Avis. Their road signs are bait: A cave to sleep in, a tree to sip tea in, horses to ride, birds to watch and showers to rinse off the dust. The charm is koeksuster rustic, yet delightful.

But tourism's lifeline, the dirt road snaking between the Kouga and Baviaanskloof mountain ranges, is a curate's egg.

The first 100km from Willowmore via spectacular Nuwekloof pass (completed in 1890, the last major project of legendary road engineer Thomas Bain) is passable. But the next 100km, through the wilderness area to the citrus orchards and tarred roads of Patensie, is so bad that only the rich or very stupid should risk it. This stretch is 4x4 country and it might take six hours to traverse - twice as long as a few years ago. Don't try it if you have a plane to catch.

Eastern Cape road officials, encumbered by clunky rules and mired in sloth, are a despised bunch, fast overtaking leopards and caracals as perceived "vermin" because they too eat farmers' profits. "Hul is donders treurig," (they're really woeful), said one Willowmore boer, pausing for the neat inversion: "En treurige donders" (and miserable buggers).

Is the road really that bad? Yes, say those who have pierced to the stunning heart of the reserve and returned shaken and stirred. If the dongas get much deeper (and one day it will rain), the World Heritage Site might fade from the map, inviting cartographers to resurrect the line that once teased maritime charts: Here there be dragons.

None of the trail runners arriving at Zandvlakte from or via Port Elizabeth took the 180km short route on the R332 through Patensie and the wilderness area. Instead they detoured round the kloof to Willowmore - doing twice the distance in half the time.

Willowmore, the evangelical signwriting capital of the Karoo, has benefitted little from being a preferred kloof gateway. Once charming and dirt poor it is now blighted by RDP housing and remains dirt poor. Jesus and booze are its hallmarks.

The trail run began at Geelhoutbos, across the border in the park, after a night undisturbed by baboon or leopard but made sleepless by a jackass in rut. Spring had sprung. At their briefing athletes were told their hosts, Eastern Cape Parks, wanted the route changed to avoid encounters with a rhino which had calved. The run was uphill, rising hundreds of metres from forest through thicket to fynbos and back down by way of a certain animal track. If they got lost they were to blow a whistle.

The ECP's 4x4 had two flat takkies and couldn't help race organisers reflag the course.

Geelhoutbos used to be a popular resort administered by ECP but it was demolished years ago to make way for an upmarket tented camp. That plan is mired in a legal dispute and today, in a riverside clearing amid small-leaved willows, figs, white stinkwood and yellowwood, the camp wreckage remains heaped, a mess of overgrown fibrous walls, bricks and shattered toilets. No bums on seats here.

The run was won by Warren Pettersen - touted in Cape Town as their Great White Hope over the marathon distance - some 40 minutes ahead of the second finisher. But then he didn't get lost and everyone else did. Runners straggled down the mountain through thorn thickets until mid-afternoon, emerging looking as if they had run a gauntlet of gin traps. One man, on blood thinners, leaked so badly he had to be hospitalised.

Adventure racing seems designed for the young but none competed here. The finishers were aged from 30 to 61 - if you discount a 22-year-old "sweeper", not a Hindu but his job was the same; cleaning up after others.

So where were the lithe and nubile? Yes, the kloof is remote, the road lousy and mommy might have refused to part with the Landie for the weekend. But maybe some sussed that the going would be torrid and scratchy before they got skinned. Why opt for trail battle scars when for less pain you can get a decent tattoo?